By Katelynn Richardson, Daily Caller News Foundation | February 17, 2025
The Trump administration’s first major legal battle reached the Supreme Court on Sunday. In an emergency application, President Donald Trump asked the justices to allow him to fire the leader of an agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, Hampton Dellinger, after a lower court ordered his reinstatement.
Dellinger, appointed by former President Joe Biden to run the Office of Special Counsel, sued Feb. 7 shortly after Trump removed him from the position.
Though the lower court’s order only reinstates Dellinger temporarily, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the petition that it “involves an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that warrants immediate relief.”
“Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the President to retain an agency head whom the President believes should not be entrusted with executive power and to prevent the President from relying on his preferred replacement,” it continues. “Yet the district court remarkably found no irreparable harm to the President if he is judicially barred from exercising exclusive and preclusive powers of the Presidency for at least 16 days, and perhaps for a month.”
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s effort to block the lower court’s temporary hold in a 2-1 decision Saturday, noting such orders are not typically subject to appeals.
The petition also asks the justices to “end the practice whereby courts seize Article II powers for two weeks, yet disclaim the availability of any appellate review in the meantime.”
Trump’s early actions have been blocked by temporary restraining orders, including the funding freeze and a restriction on hospitals that offer child sex-changes receiving federal funds. White House officials have called out the orders as judicial overreach, slamming them for blocking legitimate uses of executive power.
“The First Congress rejected the idea that the President would need to obtain the Senate’s advice and consent to remove a principal executive officer,” Harris wrote in the petition. “No one imagined that the President might need to obtain the advice and consent of a federal district court.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service,
Katelynn Richardson is an investigative reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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